Stories of Your Life and Others | Ted Chiang

Francine Prose once described Margaret Atwood's work as "engaged less by the subtle minutiae of human interaction than by the chance to use fiction as a means of exploring and dramatizing ideas." Ted Chiang's collection is the perfect embodiment of such "idea-fiction". And despite being primarily focused on "ideas", the language and cast of his stories are organic and fine-tuned enough to avoid seeming (as many characters in speculative fiction do) merely like the collateral means to achieve a conceptual end.

"Story of Your Life" (aka "Arrival"), "Seventy-Two Letters," and "Liking What You See: A Documentary" are especially impressive.

8/10